More Third-Worldist hip-hop. Slight Trotskyist slant at the very beginning that you should be wary of, but it moves pretty quickly towards talking about the Third World oppressed & exploited. Includes praise for Marx, Lenin and lyrics taken directly from Mao.

The New York Times – At War From the Front Lines
For anyone wondering why it took President Obama three months to decide on a strategy for Afghanistan, a look at these military schematics uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel might help explain the weeks of deliberation that went into the plan. The material outlines the military’s counterinsurgency, or COIN, strategy.

The maps, which look like something Cy Twombly might put together on a spirograph, make it plain that whatever the timeline for deployment and withdrawal, there appears to be no straight line to victory in Afghanistan.

Politics Are Over would like to offer an alternative plan of action, AmeriKKKa!

On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard – whether true or false – could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil.

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long gone by. It’s the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up in the decades following the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.

“Angola is disturbing every time I go there,” Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. “It’s not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what’s going on.”

Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, concurred.

“I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a sophisticated plantation,” Johnson told Truthout. “‘Cotton is King’ still applies when it come to Angola.”

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

On land previously occupied by a slave plantation, Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an hour. Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Angola made news with a host of assaults – and killings – of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that they resorted to cutting their Achilles’ tendons in protest. At Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, another plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a “prison hospital” that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970. And Texas’s Jester State Prison Farm, formerly Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.

Since a wave of activism forced prison farm brutalities into the spotlight in the 1970s, some reforms have taken place: At Angola, for example, prison violence has been significantly reduced. But to a large extent, the official stories have been repackaged. State correctional departments now portray prison farm labor as educational or vocational opportunities, as opposed to involuntary servitude. The Alabama Department of Corrections web site, for example, states that its “Agriculture Program” “allows inmates to be trained in work habits and allows them to develop marketable skills in the areas of: Farming, Animal Husbandry, Vegetable, meat, and milk processing.”

According to Angola’s web site, “massive reform” has transformed the prison into a “stable, safe and constitutional” environment. A host of new faith-based programs at Angola have gotten a lot of media play, including features in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.

Cathy Fontenot, Angola’s assistant warden, told Truthout that the penitentiary is now widely known as an “innovative and progressive prison.”

“The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin’ and good playin’ to have a good prison,” Fontenot said, referring to the head warden, Burl Cain. “Angola has all these.”

However, the makeover has been markedly incomplete, according to prisoners and their advocates.

“Most of the changes are cosmetic”, said Johnson, who was released from Angola in 1992 and, in his new capacity as a prison rights advocate, stays in contact with Angola prisoners. “In the conventional plantations, slaves were given just enough food, clothing and shelter to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true for the Louisiana prison system.”

Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labor are still almost nonexistent compared with the federal minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour, according to Fontenot. Agricultural laborers fall on the lowest end of the pay scale.

What’s more, prisoners may keep only half the money they make, according to Johnson, who notes that the other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use to “set themselves up” after they’re released.

Besides the fact that two cents an hour may not accumulate much of a start-up fund, there is one glaring peculiarity about this arrangement: due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, most Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven percent will die in prison, according to Fontenot.

(Ironically, the “progressive” label may well apply to Angola, relative to some locations: In Texas, Arkansas and Georgia, most prison farms pay nothing at all.)

Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days. However, since extra work can be mandated as a punishment for “bad behavior,” hours may pile up well over that limit, former prisoner Robert King told Truthout.

“Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine,” remembered King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola, until he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence of the crime for which he was incarcerated.

It’s common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports have been filed, according to Johnson. Yet, those reports don’t necessarily indicate that a prisoner has violated any rules. Johnson describes guards writing out reports well before the weekend, fabricating incident citations, then filling in prisoners’ names on Friday, sometimes at random. Those prisoners would then spend their weekend in the cotton fields.

Although mechanical cotton pickers are almost universally used on modern-day farms, Angola prisoners must harvest by hand, echoing the exact ritual that characterized the plantation before emancipation.

According to King, these practices are undergirded by entrenched notions of race-based authority.

“Guards talked to prisoners like slaves,” King told Truthout. “They’d tell you the officer was always right, no matter what.”

During the 1970s, prisoners were routinely beaten or “dungeonized” without cause, King said. Now, guards’ power abuses are more expertly concealed, but they persist, fed by racist assumptions, according to King.

Johnson described some of the white guards burning crosses on prison lawns.

Much of this overt racism stems from the way the basic system – and even the basic population – of Angola and its environs have remained static since the days of slavery, according to Pegram. After the plantation was converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and their descendants kept their general roles, becoming prison officials and guards. This white overseer community, called B-Line, is located on the farm’s grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labor, Angola’s inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners laboring as they golf.

Another landmark of the town, the Angola Prison Museum, is also run by multi-generation Angola residents. The museum exhibits “Old Sparky,” the solid oak electric chair used for executions at Angola until 1991. Visitors can purchase shirts that read, “Angola: A Gated Community.”

Despite its antebellum MO, Angola’s labor system does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which prohibits forced labor, contains a caveat. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

That clause has a history of being manipulated, according to Fordham Law Professor Robert Kaczorowski, who has written extensively on civil rights and the Constitution. Directly after the 13th Amendment was enacted, it began to be utilized to justify slavery-like practices, according to Kaczorowski. Throughout the South, former slaves were arrested for trivial crimes (vagrancy, for example), fined, and imprisoned when they could not pay their fines. Then, landowners could supply the fine in exchange for the prisoner’s labor, essentially perpetuating slavery.

Although such close reproductions of private enslavement were phased out, the 13th Amendment still permits involuntary servitude.

“Prisoners can be forced to work for the government against their will, and this is true in every state,” Kaczorowski told Truthout.

In recent years, activists have begun to focus on the 13th Amendment’s exception for prisoners, according to Pegram. African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated; one in three black men has been in prison at some point in his life. Therefore, African-Americans are much more likely to be subject to involuntary servitude.

“I would have more faith in that amendment if it weren’t so clear that our criminal justice system is racially biased in a really obvious way,” Pegram said.

Prison activists like Johnson believe that ultimately, permanently changing the status quo at places like Angola may mean changing the Constitution – amending the 13th Amendment to abolish involuntary servitude for all.

“I don’t have any illusions that this is a simple process,” Johnson said. “Many people are apathetic about what happens in prisons. It would be very difficult, but I would not suggest it would be impossible.”

Even without a constitutional overhaul, some states have done away with prison farms of their own accord. In Connecticut, where the farms were prevalent before the 1970s, the farms have been phased out, partially due to the perceived slavery connection. “Many black inmates viewed farm work under these circumstances as too close to slavery to want to participate,” according to a 1995 report to the Connecticut General Assembly.

For now, though, the prison farm is alive and well in Louisiana. And at Angola, many prisoners can expect to be buried on the land they till. Two cemeteries, Point Lookout 1 and 2, lie on the prison grounds. No one knows exactly how many prisoners are interred in the former, since, after a flood washed away the first Angola cemetery in 1927, the bodies were reburied in a large common grave.

Point Lookout 1 is now full, and with the vast majority of Angola’s prisoners destined to die in prison, Point Lookout 2 is well on its way, according to King.

“Angola is pretty huge,” King said. “They’ve got a lot of land to bury a lot of prisoners.”

No one knows how many of the prisoners kept in involuntary servitude at Angola are innocent. But at least one who has proven his innocence in court, overturning his conviction, is still behind bars.

A recent poll has people talking. The results of the poll are a sharp contrast to the free-market triumphalism of the 1990s. Intellectuals were declaring the victory of capitalism. In the 1989 book, the End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama declared that history was over and that free-market, liberal society was the final form of human society, the end point of civilization. Others got a piece of the action too. Post-modern liberal Richard Rorty liked to say that Western liberalism, with all its flaws, is the best that has been offered up by history: The age of ideology is over, or at least it should be. Globalist capitalism, or its companion “capitalism with a human face,” was the new mantra. That was then.

The recent poll implies that most people correctly know that the system as it currently exists is bad for them. The poll, conducted across 27 countries, reports that only 11 percent of people think that free-market capitalism is working well. Of the 29,000 people polled, only one in five think that capitalism is working well.

Almost a quarter of all those polled, 23 percent, think that capitalism is fatally flawed. The majorities in 22 of the 27 countries support a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The poll shows that the majority of humanity has some sense of their own oppression even if they do not understand their oppression scientifically.

One poll result has been the focus of much commentary: Double digits in the imperialist countries see capitalism as “fatally flawed.” Over 40 percent in France and 15 percent in the US think that capitalism is fatally flawed. This figure is making its way through the First Worldist “left” that stupidly sees the double digits as confirmation of their worldview. These kinds of polls are not new. For example, Max Elbaum, in Revolution in the Air, peddled the same claim about the 1960s. Elbaum reports that 3 million people in the US thought revolution was necessary at that time. However, seeing capitalism as “fatally flawed” or that “revolution is necessary” is not an endorsement of socialism. In fact, nihilism runs deep in First World. It is a good bet that many see all systems as fatally flawed. Although there may be support for social democracy or social imperialism or fascism in the First World, there is almost no support for actual socialism there.

Actual socialism is perceived as frightening by First World peoples for the same reasons that many express their disappointment with the current capitalist system. Most in the First World believe that they are entitled to more privilege, not less. The current economic crisis has resulted in a drop in the standard of living. No doubt that this is reflected in the numbers. In addition, under actual socialism, First World populations will have even less privilege than they do under the current capitalist system. Actual socialism on a world scale entails something close to an equal distribution of the global social product. Under such a distribution, virtually everyone in the First World will see their incomes cut drastically, their purchasing power reduced, their leisure time shortened, etc. After all, Karl Marx wrote that the ruling classes would tremble in the face of communist revolution. The entire First World, almost without exception, trembles at the prospect of genuine proletarian revolution.

There is almost no social base at all for revolution in the First World. It is a mystery to the First Worldist why the First World workers are not lining up for revolution. The First Worldist, like Goldilocks, looks to find that combination of mass line and party building, spontanaity and commandism, agitation and propaganda, hot and cold, that will be “just right.” What the First Worldist utopians don’t realize is that there is no key that will unlock First Worldist proletarian revolution because there is no significant proletariat in the First World. There are hardly any masses at all in the First World. There are plenty of asses, however. Maoist-Third Worldists, by contrast, recognize that since the vast majority in the First World oppose real socialism, revolutionaries in the First World must design minoritarian strategies. Revolutionaries find themselves behind enemy lines in the First World. Real revolutionaries adopt Jacobin strategies appropriate to their unique conditions in the First World.

The same poll asked people how they perceived the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Poll results varied greatly across countries. The fall of the Soviet Union is mostly seen as a “good thing” in Europe, and, presumably, most of the First World: 79 percent in Germany, 76 percent in Britain and 74 percent in France feel that the dissolution was a good thing. However, 70 percent of Egyptians think that the fall of the Soviet Union was a “bad thing.” And, in Russia, Ukraine, and Pakistan, sizable majorities report that the fall was mainly a bad thing. In India, Kenya, and Indonesia, opinions are sharply divided.

Even though the Soviet Union in 1989 was not socialist, it is incorrectly perceived as both socialist and anti-imperialist by many. The poll results in many cases are, thus, less about the actual Soviet Union and more about the hostility that many in the Third World feel toward imperialism and capitalism. Such poll results can be more of an expression of pre-scientific, intuitive class hatred directed toward the Western imperialists. Ironically, the revisionist Soviet Union was imperialist also. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union became social imperialist. Even though the revisionists used socialist rhetoric, their actions were still imperialist.

Capitalism-imperialism has failed to guarantee a decent life for the vast majority of the world’s population. Most people in the Third World barely survive while most people in the First World live in relative luxury. Thus it is no surprise that opinions about the current system and about the Soviet Union would vary greatly. Similarly, opinions about revolutionary leaders also vary greatly between Western and non-Western countries. Stalin is seen as no different than Hitler in the West. However, in the ex-Soviet bloc, Stalin often polls as one of the greatest leaders of all time. It is a good sign that so many in the Third World understand that the system has failed them. It is the job of the communist to transform that basic intuition into a scientific understanding and revolution.

An average e-waste processing worker in Guiyu, China earns US$0.30 an hour while the town itself reports revenues of $75 million from processing 1.5 million tonnes of e-waste a year. Eighty per cent of the waste that Guiyu processes comes from the Imperialist parasite First World nations. This worker lives in a polluted hell on Earth.

The average Nashua resident makes $37,500 to $50,000 USD a year, salaried, with a healthcare package, a car, and a home and lives in what is essentially a vacationer’s paradise of a state.

One of these things is not like the other, oh one of these things just isn’t the same~♫

Sorry that the truth isn’t convenient to the continuation of your unsustainable First World lifestyle. Americans are going to need to give things up, not get more. Anything less is revisionist garbage and pig-work.

Comrade ‘simon’ writes:

But what about those first world ‘asses’ like myself who are beginning to see things from a Third worldist perspective?

simon

Comrade, those in the first world who are capable of understanding the world from the perspective of Third Worldism are able to see the world through the eyes of the oppressed. The difference between real Marxists and fake Marxists is that real Marxists have a Proletarian Worldview. They take into account the suffering of the world’s vast majority who live under the boot of Imperialism before opening their mouths to demand more for their privileged lives.

If you are truly beginning to see the world from the perspective of the world’s oppressed, then more power to you. I strongly encourage that you study Maoism-Third Worldism more in depth and begin to build upon that foundation of a worldview so that you can more effectively revolutionize your mind.